Left-wing activists are upset that the U.S. Government is deporting too many illegal immigrants who don’t have “serious” criminal records, the Miami Herald reports. “Few deported aliens have serious criminal records, activists say,” ran the headline in the paper. Question is, what do the activists and the Herald consider a “few”? The number apparently hovers at about 40,000.
According to the paper, the Secure Communities program of Immigration and Custom Enforcement “has identified more than 262,900 foreign nationals in jails and prisons who have been charged with or convicted of criminal offenses, including more than 39,000 charged with or convicted of major violent or drug offenses.… [T]he program led to the deportation of more than 34,600 convicted criminal foreigners, including more than 9,800 convicted of major violent or drug offenses.”
Secure Communities, via ICE’s 287(g) program, permits local police agencies to check a suspect’s fingerprints against a federal database containing those of criminal aliens, and the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights isn’t happy about it. With the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, it analyzed ICE documents. The group, the Herald reports, “says that the majority or 79 percent of people deported in connection to Secure Communities were non-criminals or had been picked up by local police for relatively minor offenses including traffic violations or petty juvenile mischief.”
It cited the tearful case of “a mother of two beautiful young U.S. citizen children who was deported last year. She was stopped by a … police officer returning from taking her children to school and charged with no valid driver license. As a result of Secure Communities, an immigration hold was placed on her and she was deported, leaving her two young children, without their mother, in the care of relatives.”
She was, of course, breaking the law by driving without a driver’s license. As The New American has reported before, unlicensed illegal alien drivers are a terrifying menace on American roads.
As well, the program is catching dangerous criminals. Just days ago, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer reported, thanks to Secure Communities police learned that a suspect who raped two children was an illegal Ecuadoran. According to McClatchy News Service, Secure Communities is now working with nearly 500 jails in 27 states and expects to be operating across the country in 2013.
The program is important because illegal alien criminals use aliases and fake identification to escape the law after they have been arrested, deported and re-entered the country. One example is Jose Lopez Madrigal, who was deported nine times before the authorities collared him on a rape charge.
In May, KING5 TV in Edmonds Wash., reported the shocking details of Mexican illegal‘s criminal career:
[L]earning his identity took much longer because of some 30 aliases. It was only through fingerprints that they identified him as Madrigal, a Mexican citizen.
Madrigal’s arrest and immigration record includes a staggering number of contacts with law enforcement since 1989. That’s the year he was convicted of theft using a firearm in California.
He was deported a couple of times after that. Then in 1999, he was arrested for drug sales in both San Diego and San Francisco. Records show that he was deported three times that year between April and August. He was arrested for drugs again in Stockton, Calif. in 2000. In 2002, he pleaded to third degree sexual assault in Denver. Later that year, he was deported again. And in 2003, records show he was deported three more times.
Others like Madrigal, of course, are still at large, waiting to rape and kill.
Photo: A suspect is fingerprinted by a Maricopa Country Sheriff’s detention officer on July 26, 2010 to check his immigration status at a 287(g) processing station in Phoenix: AP Images
